True Tales of Arctic Heroism in the New World

by A. W. Greely

"The northern lights they take to be the spirits of the dead playing ball with the head of a walrus."

The principal encampments were between Kemisak and Omevik, beyond which place to the north, said the natives of Kemisak, there were no inhabitants. The Eskimos numbered two hundred and ninety-five and were called the Omivekkians.

Of their environment in favorable places and their amusements Graah reported: "The cove had fields of considerable extent, covered with dwarf willows, juniper berry, black crakeberry, and whortleberry heath, with many patches of fine grass. The stream, abounding in char, had its source in the glaciers of which several gigantic arms reached down from the height in the background. Flowers everywhere adorned the fields. Three hundred paces from the sea the cliffs rise almost perpendicularly, with snow-clad summits, far beyond the average height. The natives had here assembled to feast upon the char, plentiful and of large size, the black crakeberry, and angelica, gathering them also for winter use. They give themselves up to mirth and merrymaking. This evening, to the number of two hundred or more, they began by torch-light their tambourine dance, a favorite festival."

Graah believed that there were no natives living to the north of Cape Dan, and that, when the greater part of the Eskimos seen by him moved to West Greenland, in the course of a few years, the whole coast was deserted. This belief was seemingly, though erroneously, confirmed by the fact that, while Clavering saw a few natives in 74° N., Scoresby, Koldewey, Ryder, Nathorst, and the Duke of Orleans, in their explorations, saw no living native on the east coast.

It remained for the expeditions of Hall, Nares, Greely, Amdrup, Holm, and Mylius-Erichsen to prove by their united observations that there was not only an Inuit settlement on the east coast, but that such natives are the descendants of the true Children of the Ice, who have crossed Grinnell Land, skirted northern Greenland, and thus come eventually to their present habitat. Their fathers were formerly inhabitants of the most northerly lands of the globe, of the lands of Grant, Grinnell, Greenland, and Hazen (or Peary).

Brief and transient may have been their occupation of many of the various encampments during their devious wanderings in the long migration, covering nearly two thousand miles of travel. Their summer tent-rings and stone winter huts dot the favoring shores of every game-producing fiord from Cape Farewell, in 60° N., northward to Brönlund Fiord, Hazen (Peary) Land, 82° 08′ N., on the nearest known land to the north pole.

They travelled leisurely, seeking fruitful hunting grounds and living on the game of the land or of the adjacent sea. They thus netted the salmon of the glacial lakes, searched the valleys for deer, snared the ptarmigan, lanced the lumbering musk-ox, speared the sea-fowl, caught the seal, slaughtered the walrus, and they are believed to have even pursued in kayaks and lanced the narwhal and the white whale.

While Mylius-Erichsen and his heroic comrades obtained the definite information as to the extreme northern limit of Inuit habitation of all time, and paid the price of such data with their lives, it was with equal bravery but happier fortune that Captain G. Holm rescued from oblivion, and thus indirectly raised to happier life, the struggling descendants of the iron men and women whose unfailing courage and fertile resourcefulness had wrested food and shelter from the most desolate and the most northerly land environment of the world.

Once, in 1860, there came to the Cape Farewell trading station an Inuit who had lost his toes and fingertips. Though just able to grasp a paddle with his stumpy fingers, he was an expert kayaker and threw his javelin with the left hand. He said that he was from a place called Angmagsalik, and that between eight hundred and a thousand natives dwelt in that vicinity. For nearly a quarter of a century this report of the existence of an unknown tribe of Inuits remained unverified. In 1883, however, the exploration of this part of East Greenland was made by a Danish officer of extended and successful experience in the governmental surveys of southern Greenland, who fully recognized the hazardous and prolonged nature of such an expedition. The Inuits said that many lives had been lost in attempting the shore-ice of the east coast, and that a round trip to and from Angmagsalik—"Far, oh! so far to the north!"—took from three to four years.